How Block is building AI-powered security with OpenAI technology

Block, the company behind Square, Cash App, and Afterpay, is using OpenAI's Defense Factory, including the Daybreak model, to enhance its security operations. The AI handles vulnerability discovery, detection, and response at scale, reducing weeks of work to hours. According to James Nettesheim, Chief Information Security Officer, AI compresses the time from human intent to action, allowing defenders to keep pace with attackers. The team uses AI for tasks like code generation, detection tuning, and investigations, with human validation. For instance, replaying detection changes against seven months of telemetry now takes under an hour, and red team exercises have seen attack paths chained in two hours and patches proposed in 18 minutes. The automated triage system has increased throughput by 50%, boosted intelligence gathering by 50%, and enabled autonomous hunting. It completes approximately 1,100 analyst-hours of investigation per quarter and returns 600 analyst-hours previously spent on false positives. The team routes tasks to appropriate models via a security harness built on Daybreak, with human oversight. Moving forward, they aim to reduce vulnerabilities introduced and focus on preventative work, making advanced AI capabilities accessible to all organizations.

(Source：OpenAI)